In Memory of Archbishop Oscar Romero
Today marks the 32nd anniversary of the assassination of Roman Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, who was gunned down on March 24, 1980 while celebrating mass at a small chapel in that country's capital. As both his hands held the raised chalice a single bullet (see last week's blog - A single Bullet to the Heart) from an assassin's gun pierced his heart, killing him instantly. Archbishop Romero was unswerving in his fight against injustice and oppression and indefatigable in his fight on behalf of the poor. About a month before his death he wrote a letter to United States President Jimmy Carter. As far as I know, he never received a reply from the President. The following is the full text of that letter:
*****
His Excellency
The President of the United
States
Mr. Jimmy Carter
Dear Mr. President:
In the last few days, news has appeared in the
national press that worries me greatly. According to the reports, your
government is studying the possibility of economic and military support and
assistance to the present government junta.
Because you are a Christian and because you have
shown that you want to defend human rights, I venture to set forth for you my
pastoral point of view in regard to this news and to make a specific request of
you.
I am very concerned by the news that the
government of the United
States is planning to further El
Salvador ’s arms race by sending
military equipment and advisors to “train three Salvadoran battallions in
logistics, communications, and intelligence.” If this information from the
papers is correct, instead of favoring greater justice and peace in El
Salvador , your government’s
contribution will undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the repression
inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for respect
for their most basic human rights.
The present government junta and, especially,
the armed forces and security forces have unfortunately not demonstrated their
capacity to resolve in practice the nation’s serious political and structural
problems. For the most part, they have resorted to repressive violence,
producing a total of deaths and injuries much greater than under the previous
military regime, whose systematic violation of human rights was reported by the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
The brutal form in which the security forces
recently evicted and murdered the occupiers of the headquarters of the
Christian Democratic Party, even though the junta and the party apparently did
not authorize the operation, is an indication that the junta and the Christian
Democrats do not govern the country, but that political power is in the hands
of unscrupulous military officers who know only how to repress the people and favor
the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy.
If it is true that last November a “group of six
Americans was in El Salvador…providing $200,000 in gas masks and flak jackets
and teaching how to use them against demonstrators,” you ought to be informed
that it is evident that since the security forces, with increased personal
protection and efficiency, have even more violently repressed the people, using
deadly weapons.
For this reason, given that as a Salvadoran and
archbishop of the archdiocese of San
Salvador , I have an obligation to see
that faith and justice reign in my country, I ask you, if you truly want to
defend human rights:
- to forbid that military aid be given to the Salvadoran government;
- to guarantee that your government will not intervene directly or indirectly, with military, economic, diplomatic, or other pressures, in determining the destiny of the Salvadoran people;
In these moments, we are living through a
grave economic and political crisis in our country, but it is certain that
increasingly the people are awakening and organizing and have begun to prepare
themselves to manage and be responsible for the future of El Salvador, as the
only ones capable of overcoming the crisis.
It would be unjust and deplorable for foreign
powers to intervene and frustrate the Salvadoran people, to repress them and
keep them from deciding autonomously the economic and political course that our
nation should follow. It would be to violate a right that the Latin American
bishops, meeting at Puebla, recognized publicly when we spoke of “the
legitimate self-determination of our peoples, which allows them to organize
according to their own spirit and the course of their history and to cooperate
in a new international order” (Puebla, 505).
I hope that your religious sentiments and your
feelings for the defense of human rights will move you to accept my petition,
thus avoiding greater bloodshed in this suffering country.
Archbishop
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